I find the subject of the comic book business endlessly fascinating. For those of you who know nothing about comics, here is a brief overview:
The American comics market is dominated by two companies: Marvel and DC. DC is currently owned by AOL TIme Warner and is responsible for such characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern. Marvel, whose characters include Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Captain America, and the Fantastic Four, has had a series of owners over the last several years and has had a bit of financial trouble. Both companies have titles for mature readers (DC’s line of these has been around a lot longer; Marvel just revived theirs recently), but by and large the vast majority of titles these companies produce are superheroes.
In the early nineties, several prominent artists at Marvel decided to pack up and start their own company, and Image Comics was born. Image quickly became a strong competitor, due in no small part to the speculation boom of that period. Comics speculation involves buying up copies of comics which are considered to be rare or special or otherwise have some quality that might make them valuable in the future. In the early nineties, the companies were very actively encouraging this behavior, and some comics were selling in the millions. However, the speculators soon realized that the fifty copies of X-MEN #1 they bought were never going to appreciate in value just because there were so many of them, and so they gradually stopped buying comics. Many people who bought comics and actually read them also stopped buying them, disgusted at the way the companies pandered to the speculators with things like limited-edition foil covers and Wolverine guest appearances. Nowadays, X-MEN is lucky if it sells a hundred thousand, and it has consistently been one of the market’s top-selling books since the eighties. Sales have been dropping all over.
Other companies include Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Oni Press, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf Comix, Slave Labor Graphics, Bongo Comics, and dozens and dozens of others. All of whom have booths at San Diego, and their combined work covers a far greater spectrum of storytelling genres than the big companies, and also sells significantly fewer copies.
Hot-button issues in the comics biz right now include:
1. Comic book versus trade paperback format. People like trade paperback collections of comics. They look nice on a bookshelf and they don’t get torn up. Generally they are a better value for your money. But if nobody is buying monthly issues of a comic because they are “waiting for the trade”, the company will perceive that comic as a failure and cancel it, with no collection to follow. So why not simply release the books as trade paperbacks in the first place? Apparently the overhead is too expensive.
2. Creator ownership. The way things work at the major companies, for the most part, is that if Creator A invents a new series, and creates a cast of characters, that series and those characters are legally the property of Company B. (For the purposes of this exercise, let us assume the series is called BOOGIE-WOOGIE BUGLE BOY.) That means that once Creator A is done telling his story and leaves the book, Company B can hire Creator C to continue the book. Moreover, it means that Editor D can fire Creator A from the book he created at any time. Now, if Creator A owned his series and his characters, he could take it all over to Company E if he found that Company B was not the right place for him. And he would get a much, much larger percent of the profits should Movie Producer F ever option the rights to his characters.
3. Distribution. One company has a virtual monopoly on comics distribution, and lately any competition the company has had has been doomed to fail. Comics are no longer as widespread as they once were. They used to be common on newsstands, in grocery stores, and in bookstores. Now stapled comics are almost exclusively only available in specialty stores. It is becoming an increasingly niche business. (A major exception is Archie Comics, who always have comics in the supermarket checkout line. Why can’t DC get a SUPERMAN digest in there? Is the money not worth the effort?)
A panel I attended today dealt with the niche-squared concept of online comics non-news journalism, and why it is important. I would argue that commentary, interviews, and reviews are far more valuable than the regurgitated press-release style of much comics news today. Ninth Art is my favorite site for comics reviews and commentary, and it is very nicely designed, too.
Dinner and drinking tonight were again at the Gaslamp Strip Club. It’s a great place, but I don’t know if my system can handle another night of nearly-raw steak.
